Recent advances in communications, e.g., cellular telephony and other forms of wireless and wireline communications, have significantly increased the amount of information that can be transferred to and from communications devices. Despite these advances, however, the feature set associated with typical telephone voice calls remains limited.
For example, when a user receives a telephone call, there is usually very limited information that the user receives about the caller, other than perhaps the caller's phone number. If the caller's number is not already stored in the called user's address book, then there is virtually no other information available about the caller's identity. Similarly, when a user places a voice call from a phone, there is virtually no information provided to the caller about the called user's status, e.g., whether the called user is available to talk, the physical whereabouts of the called user, etc.
It would be desirable to provide efficient and backward-compatible techniques for increasing the information available to users during a conventional telephone call.